“There’s a difference between representation and perspective,” Cole Escola said to me over iced teas recently. “People don’t want a show from a queer person or a person of color unless the show is about them being a person of color or about them being queer explicitly for a straight audience through a straight lens, where they’re straightsplaining what it’s like for a gay person.”
this is why Nannette was a hit with straight media
every song on be the cowboy is about lonliness or longing…but it’s a departure from what critics call mitski’s “sad” ouevre. it’s accepting, it’s embracing, sometimes it’s even happy. it’s like you’re in a great expanse of nothingness, with nothing but your thoughts and your skeptically-held dreams, but it’s so grand and you’ve accepted that this is how it has to be OH MY GOD WAIT. ACCEPTING YOUR ROLE IN A GRAND EXPANSE OF NOTHINGNESS LIKE A FUCKING COWBOY
so, as you all know, being gay was considered a mental illness in the ‘30s, if not a medical defect. and as you also know, the superserum was supposed to cure steve of all his medical defects.
imagine how overwhelmingly relieved he is after he’s gotten the serum and he realizes he’s still queer. how vindicated. the serum fixed his lungs and his back and his vision, but it can’t fix something that isn’t wrong with him, and i can’t stop thinking about his face when he realizes that his queerness isn’t something that needs to be fixed.
take time to figure it out 